


darling you're stars

by deniigiq



Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Clothes-hoarding, Established Relationship, Laundry, M/M, Matt is a packrat with very particular taste, Romance, Sharing Clothes, Synesthesia, but def still a rat tho don't get it twisted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-20
Updated: 2019-06-20
Packaged: 2020-05-15 10:59:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19294369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: Matt wanted only Foggy’s purple flannel and if he could not have that, then he would have nothing. He would go cold.(Foggy tries to understand the underlying causes of Matt's bizarre relationship with clothes.)





	darling you're stars

Foggy had a flannel shirt. A warm thing. Purple was his color and so the flannel was purple.

He’d bought Matt a flannel years ago because the little shit kept on stealing his flannel. You’d have thought it was red, but no. Matt already owned enough red shit, Matt was obsessed with red shit. Nah. Foggy had gotten him a blue flannel.

Matt hated the blue flannel as if he could see it.

Matt wanted only Foggy’s purple flannel and if he could not have that, then he would have nothing. He would go cold.

So really, Foggy had two flannels and one of them fit better than the other.

If he wore the blue one that he’d originally given Matt, the one that he’d four years ago bought two sizes too big because Matt’s favorite size of clothing was ‘falling off him,’ then Matt developed a mighty need to wear that one.

Through these flannels, he started to notice a pattern.

 

 

He’d bought Matt a scarf their first year of law school. At Christmas. He’d known at that point that Matt was Catholic and so logically worked out that Christmas should be a big deal for him. It had been a little strange when it hadn’t been. Foggy had felt a little upstream without a paddle when Matt had told him he wasn’t going home for Christmas.

Oh, of course he was going to Mass. He just wasn’t going home.

It wasn’t until years later that it came out that home was the orphanage and Matt couldn’t have gone there for Christmas. So he’d gone to Mass and come home that first year and he’d celebrated on his own with a shot of scotch and some pie and then he’d gone to bed.

Foggy had felt guilty for leaving Matt at school without even knowing his tragic backstory though, so first-year grad student Foggy had gone out and gotten Matt a scarf.

What color?

You guessed it.

Matt hated that fucking scarf. Had accepted it from Foggy with a beautiful smile and had awkwardly gifted him a shaving set in return. But he hated it.

God, he hated it.

He managed to lose it after only two wears.

So Foggy, the next year, when he’d brought Matt home with him for Christmas, had gotten him a green and blue plaid scarf.

Fuck, Matt loved that scarf. It could be found hanging from door handles and on the back of chairs and on cushions and the floor all over their many shitty apartments. Any attempt to steal that scarf for a quick, only half-accidental wash was met with major resistance.

Matt had worn his smell into the damn thing and was loathe to have to do it again. And again.

He was furious with Foggy, silently hateful when the green and blue friend made its merry way out of the dryer and folded itself nicely onto the couch or the end of Matt’s bed.

Furious.

He’d stuff it under his pillow, wear it to sleep, hide it in his backpack or jacket pockets for weeks thereafter to teach Foggy a lesson about scarf-thievery.

It was part of the pattern.

 

 

Matt had a few bits of clothing that he flat out refused to give up. Holes or not. Threadbare, whatever. One was his gray Columbia hoodie. The one that hadn’t fit him when they’d started school and sure as fuck had not improved since. Matt had worn it to bits. Worn it to pilled on the inside and then worn it thin, so that the pills were the only thing holding it together. It was uncomfortable. It was scratchy.

He would be damned before anyone donated his shitty hoodie.

Claire had tried, bless her.

She’d used the thing to mop up blood once, under the impression that it was a sacrifice-able scrap of cloth.

Oho.

Not so.

She continued to think that it was a sacrifice-able scrap of cloth, though, because it was consistently available when Matt had gone and gotten himself beaten blue.

Then one day she noticed that this particular scrap of shitty cloth sure looked familiar and she’d asked Foggy why the fuck it was always available.

So Foggy explained to her the pattern and she’d said, ‘that just fucking figures, doesn’t it?’

 

 

Karen thought she could crack the code of Matt’s capricious clothes-hoarding habit. One night, she got Matthew wasted and went through his entire closet with him. Attempting to get him to donate some of his hovel.

It wasn’t a big hovel, really. It was just scrappy.

But no, Matthew, even wasted, would have none of that. Instead he would have a nest of all his favorite bits and bobs, which Karen was not allowed to join him in. No.

No Karen smells in the nest.

Karen smells belonged in other things apparently. Foggy smells in the nest. Karen smells in the living room. In furniture. That’s where Karen smells belonged.

Not in the sheets. No one was fucking allowed in the sheets. No one’s smells rather.

Not Foggy’s. Not Claire’s. Not Karen’s. Not Elektra’s.

No one’s.

Sheets were sacred.

Sheets had to be scrubbed within an inch of their sheet-y little lives so as to impregnant them only with the smell of soap and rooftop air.

No dryers for Matt’s sheets. He’d lose his fuckin’ gourd.

The duvet? Fuckin’ fine. That was more or less acceptable. The sheets? Hell no. Get the fuck out of Matt’s face. Don’t touch them. He’d deal with them. By hand if he had to. Sex, blood, or sweat. Clear out. He’d clean them himself.

The sheets were like flannels. The flannels could not see the inside of a dryer either.

Foggy started to try to triangulate this shit.

 

 

Frank’s vest, Matt despised. He tried to destroy it. He wanted to tear it seam from seam and, if left alone, he might even try to burn the damn thing.

He stole that vest from Frank on a weekly basis, hence why Frank Castle was always on the hunt for that goddamn Red.

Man had no peace in this city. Not in the Kitchen anyways.

Matt told him to fuck off to Queens where his mama’d made him if he wanted any peace.

Frank just held him down and wrestled the vest away and asked him what the fuck kind of mongrel dog he was.

Sure enough that next weekend, though, Matt was on the hunt in the horns for that vest. Sniffing Frank out from wherever he was and trying to get fingers on the straps to make off with it.

Frank was just about ready to do his head in.

Then finally, he just gave it to him. Just fuckin’ have it, you menace, here. Take it.

A mistake.

A mistake, sir.

Matt brought it to Foggy as if he’d want it and then ran water in the tub and drowned the thing in bleach. And once the vest was good and dead, several shades paler, Matt went at it with his hands where he could. Shredding the seams with a knife Foggy hadn’t known he’d owned until he could break them apart.

Man ripped the lining out and went to town on the pockets.

Destroyed the fuckin’ thing. Like a gal burning her ex’s letters to her.

And when he was done, he stuffed the sopping wet threads that remained into a bag with a rock and attempted to plunge them into the Hudson.

Frank was horrified.

Karen awed.

Foggy was mostly just concerned at the methodical destruction going on here.

Frank got a new vest, a little nervously this time. But before he waltzed up to charm the guy at the front of the store to sell it to him, he brought Matt with and let him sniff at it and pull at it and generally test its limits and its smell-power before begrudgingly giving it a green light.

They played this game every couple of months, with Matt sending each vest to vest-hell via ritual dismemberment and Frank standing by while he witnessed the work that someone with skill and intent could make of his armor.

Frank asked Foggy if the act was a threat, but Foggy didn’t really think that it was. He thought that it was more of Matt cleansing Frank of his sins on a monthly rotation that only he could know.

Matt after all, for all his grousing and whining, really seemed to feel something for Frank that he couldn’t describe. It seemed to have gotten muddled in the space between love and hate. But that didn’t make it any less powerful.

 

 

Other clothes, Matt couldn’t be bothered with. His suits were a work uniform that he’d come to hate but endured as a means of getting his fingers into the cracks of courtroom doors. He put up with his gym gear. He lived with his coats.

He scrutinized and lambasted every set of shoes that he owned. Disgusted with them, each and every one.

Foggy didn’t know how to help him because, try as he might, he just couldn’t crack the code.

Yes, Matt hoarded fabric. Yes, Matt seemed to prefer cool colors in them.

Smells were important.

Comfort varied.

The rhymes and reasons behind the shit that he loved and the shit that he hated was virtually unknowable.

All Foggy could do was categorize the cloth into two sets:

The cloth that Matt loved

The cloth that Matt hated

There was nothing in the middle, it wasn’t that kind of scale.

 

 

Finally, he just asked. It sometimes made sense to ask these types of things, but a lot of times it wasn’t worth the trouble because Matt couldn’t explain.

Or rather, the way he could explain wouldn’t register as sense in Foggy’s brain.

Foggy had asked him once why he was obsessed with lemongrass, and Matt had gotten frustrated when Foggy had pushed him to explain more beyond ‘nice smell.’

He’d said things like ‘coupled,’ and ‘matching’ and ‘harmony.’ And Foggy had had to make sure they were still talking about grass and not music.

In the face of this dissonance, Matt had tried adjectives.

Lemongrass was cool.

Lemongrass was yellow.

Lemongrass was light blue and ocean waves on shore. Blue skies.

Lemongrass was sharp sugar and tacky and sticky.

And Foggy almost got what he was saying. But there was a gap there that he would never understand because he and Matt simply didn’t feel things the same way.

For the clothes, Foggy piled Matt onto his bed and curled up around him and breathed in his scent and murmured, “help me understand, Matty. What the fuck is your deal with the clothes?”

And Matt, bless him, tried.

Clothes were salt, Foggy. Salt and heat and orange. Sheets were transparent and whispers. That damn vest was rosemary and blue. Blue, blue, _blue,_ Foggy. Almost velvet. Purple velvet. Almost _green_ , Foggy.

The grey sweatshirt was safe. It was just safe. It was abrasive and abrasive was safe.

The flannel was grey. The flannel was pink. The flannel was like the sheets, but not whispers.

Murmurs. Murmurs into skin. They spoke, the flannels.

They spoke in purples.

They tasted of sage. No, detergent doesn’t matter. They always tasted of sage.

It didn’t make sense. All Foggy got from it was that Matt’s senses sometimes got crossed over onto each other. Either that or the way Matt experienced the world was so overlapping that things like color and taste and smell and sound became objects and to divorce them from those objects was to render them non-objects.

Gibberish, essentially, to Foggy’s understanding.

So he thought fuck it, let’s test it.

“Matty, describe me.”

“Describe you? You’re Foggy. ‘Bout six foot tall, blond—”

“No, describe me your way.”

“My way? No, my way doesn’t make sense. It’s easier to do it your way.”

“I don’t care if it makes sense. I just want to hear what you think.”

Matt wriggled over and chewed on his lip.

“It’s gonna sound insane,” he warned.

“That’s alright, I already know you’re insane,” Foggy promised him. And with a laugh, Matt laid it out for him.

“You’re Foggy, you’re cardamom. Salt and the sky right at the horizon. But only with rain. The wrong side of silk. Sweet like sugar, not strawberries. Rich and orange right here, at the heart. And yellow. Around the edges. Loose threads and black pepper. Pink here, at your lips and lavender here, at your cheeks.” Matt kissed his lips and nuzzled in. “Cool and warm,” he said. “On top cool. Colors—cool. Warm everywhere else. Butterscotch.”

A gobbledygook of words and sensations, yeah.

But again. Foggy could almost make sense of it.

“Karen?” he asked.

“Light on water,” Matt said. “Bubbles and yellow. Wet asphalt. Blue. Karen’s blue, blue, blue. But not velvet. Like, glass. With the sun coming in.”

Huh.

“Frank,” Foggy said.

Matt huffed a little laugh.

“Smoke,” he said.

“Just smoke?”

“No. Woodsmoke and cinnamon. Grey. Frank’s red. And green at the edges. Butter and metal. Unripe lime.”

Foggy smiled at the side of Matt’s face and pressed the bridge of his nose into Matt’s cheek. Matt brought up his hand squeezed at Foggy’s wrist.

“It’s a mess,” he said.

“Like you,” Foggy told him. He pressed a kiss in where his nose had been. “Let me try.”

“You try?” Matt said incredulously.

“Yeah, punk. You got a monopoly on nonsense now?”

Matt laughed and wrapped Foggy’s fingers over his mouth to show him he’d be quiet. But that was the opposite of what Foggy needed. He pulled the hand away and took another kiss. One, two. And three for good luck.

There.

Now he could work.

“Matty, you’re clouds,” he said. “Bit white puffy things with the grey underneath. And coffee and periwinkle—you remember periwinkle? And I think, maybe honeysuckle and burnt orange—think caramel at night. But also like, the glow of neon lights. That sound, too. The buzzing. How am I doing? Is this any good?”

The world tipped sideways for a second and he blinked to find Matt on top of him, just fucking beaming.

“I love you so fucking much,” he said. “I love you to the fucking stars and back, you know that?”

Well.

Duh.

Come on, man. Keep up.

Matt cackled and dropped his face into Foggy’s neck and practically purred in there.

So apparently, whatever that was, it had been the right thing to say. Or maybe if not the right thing to say, the right thing to do.

He dragged a hand through Matt’s hair.

“I love you, too, Matty,” he said. “Does this mean I can wash the sheets?”

“Over my dead body.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I like to think that Matt experiences the world in an entirely undefinable way to most people, sighted and otherwise. I feel like his senses have really fucked with his way of being in the world and his way of knowing the world and so while he uses a lot of the same descriptors as other people, the actual process of figuring out which descriptors to use takes some puzzle-piecing and even then, they don't really convey his experience. 
> 
> Language in general fails to convey his experience of space, people, and things.


End file.
